The history of contemporary art in Russia, from socialist realism to the post-Soviet alternative art scene. In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary art through a distinctly Russian lens, a "communal optic" that registers the influence of such characteristically Russian phenomena as communal living, communal perception, and communal speech practices. This way of looking at the subject allows him to gather together a range of artists and art move...
This is the first book to focus on the complex and fascinating relationship between Russian and Italian Futurism. A long overdue examination of the subject, it explores the energetic, creative and occasionally violent encounters of East and West in the arena of avant-garde art. After founding Futurism in Italy in 1909, F.T. Marinetti's ambition was to establish an international Futurist movement that would develop his own group's activities and interests. Futurist ideas were familiar to Russian...
Dmitri Prigov. Theatre of Revolutionary Action
by Sam Goff, Ksenya Gurshtein, and Daniil Leiderman
The rise of critical realism in nineteenth-century Russia culminated in 1870 with the formation of the Wanderers, Russia’s first independent artistic society. Through depictions of the harsh lives of the peasantry, the fate of political activists, Russian history, landscapes, and portraits of the nation’s cultural elite, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the society became synonymous with dissident sentiments. Yet its members were far from being purveyors of anti-Tsarist propaganda and their canva...
Dialogues
Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels,...
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field, they are intended for film enthusiasts and students, combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing. This KinoSputnik about Fedor Bondarchuk's megahit Stalingrad (2013) examines the production, context and reception of the film, whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes. Fedor Bondarchuk’s 2013 blockbuster film Stalingrad shattered box-...
Picturing the Cosmos elucidates the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship in the Soviet Union in the Cold War period, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena narrating the Soviet Union’s 1957 victory in the ‘Race for Space’, the author illustrates the media’s role in cementing the way for Communism whilst retaining top-secret information. Each photo is examined as a deliberate, functioning...
The subject of Russian Futurism is familiar only to experts, and based on highly limited material. No other movement appears to have evoked quite the same public response, having, as it does, social roots. Referred to as "the art of the future" by the Russian press in 1908 - a year before the official appearance of the word - this book focuses on the works of some forty-two artistic 'revolutionaries' featuring vibrant examples of their work, which serve to inspire the imagination. The work of Da...
Explodity - Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art
by Nancy Perloff
Painters and poets-including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky-collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning "beyond the mind"), which was distinctive in its emphasis on "sound as such" and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (...
This publication is dedicated to the history of Russian drawing and watercolours of the first half of the nineteenth century. The book is aimed at combining various methods of studying this vast material: chronological, genre, stylistic, artistic, analytic, historical and everyday. Drawing is presented here as an independent creative sphere as well as collaborating with other forms of art. The catalogue introduces individual peculiarities of outstanding artists of that period and researches draw...
Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery and A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum house the world-famous collections of Russian art and theatre design. This publication brings together for the first time a representative selection of works by Jewish artists from these two treasure troves. Some of the artists have great reputations, but most of them have until now remained obscure. "Modern Masterpieces from Moscow" covers the period from the birth of the Russian avant-garde around 1910 until the...
An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations.The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primit...
Comradely Objects (Studies in Design and Material Culture)
by Yulia Karpova
The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hack-work and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book offers a new perspective on the history of Soviet design by focusing on the notion of the comradely object as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet design inherited from the avant-g...
This reader is intended to accompany undergraduate courses in the history of Russian cinema or Russian culture through film. It consists of excerpts from English language criticism and translations of excerpts of Russian-language criticism, as well as commissioned essays on thirty subtitled films widely taught in American and British courses on Russian film and culture. The arrangement will be chronological, from Sten'ka Razin through How I Ended This Summer, with a general introduction to each...
Russian Realisms (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
by Molly Brunson
One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converg...
*Winner of the Pushkin House Prize for the Best Book in Translation 2018*From a renowned graphic artist and activist, an incredible portrait of life in Russia today'A surprisingly uplifting, moving and often very funny chronicle of grassroots protest movements, political trials, provincial sex workers and bomb-scare-ridden LGBT festivals' - The Times'Victoria Lomasko's gritty, street-level view of the great Russian people masterfully intertwines quiet desperation with open defiance. Her drawings...